The country is currently in the middle of a huge hand wringing crisis of conscience over the torture reports that have been released by Congresswoman Diane Feinstein. Accusations fly, philosophies clash but the biggest question is, will there be prosecutions?
I think it’s important to look at the act itself, in order to move forward with other conclusions. For myself, I unde4stand that torture is a sub-human act, that inflicting pain of any kind to a helpless captive is against, our laws, international law and moral law, but if my grand daughter were kidnapped and I had the person in my power who held the answer to her safety, there would be no unspeakable act that I would not commit on that person to save my grand daughter. That, however, is a personal decision, one for which I would take the responsibility, and one which had no reflection on society.
What we are dealing with here is national policy, quite another thing. We are looking at a situation where the elected officials of our country, made, by their own admission, a conscious decision to order the torture of prisoners in our control. This includes many who were actually guilty of no crime and who had no information to give.
Both United States and International law forbids torture and sets out penalties for it, but both our current President and our Attorney General have stated emphatically that there will be no prosecutions for these crimes, neither for those who committed them nor those who ordered and sanctioned them.
This is a blatant disregard for the law of the land and international law. Neither the president nor the Attorney General has the right to do this.
The same has been true for the last six years for the bankers and Wall Street operators who caused the financial crash, while in the process of stealing billions of dollars from the American public. Eric Holder, the Attorney General first stated publicly, that certain financial institutions were too big to fail. Now he has retreated to a position that they are not too big to fail, but still he does nothing to prosecute them. During the last financial crash in the 80’s over 800 officers of various offending banks ended up in jail. This time, though this crash dwarfed the previous one, the total was zero.
While these monstrous offenses are going untouched we are jailing black kids across the nation for possession of two ounces of grass. What the hell is that? I’ll tell you what it is; it’s the complete subversion of our criminal justice system. People go to jail for stealing food and the millionaires steal billions with no penalty. Members of the government commit treasonable crimes and go free while Chelsea Manning sits in a prison for 35 years for telling us about those treasonous offenses.
We are living in a country where the system of justice has almost completely failed, where the rich and powerful can do almost anything they wish, commit any crime and still go free while the poor are subject to crushing penalties for the most trivial offense. This is not the justice system that our founding fathers took their lives in their hands to create.
Regular readers of this column know that I am one of those who feel that Barak Obama has done an overall good job as our president but I must state unequivocally that he has failed miserably in the area of our system of justice. You can’t forgive the criminal acts of your predecessors just because you are worried about setting a precedent whereby each new president will prosecute the previous ones actions. It’s obvious that his experience with the GOP starting with Hilary and Whitewater and extending down through almost everything he has done in office and the Republican reaction to it has made him gun shy but that is no excuse. That threat would actually act as a deterrent to Presidents and their cronies who would consider the kinds of criminal acts while in office that Bush/ Cheney and their degenerate followers engaged in while they ran the country into the ground. If the system is to work it has to work the same for all and right now it isn’t functioning that way.
There are those who will cry that we are making the country look bad but that is neither true nor important. Most thinking people, around the world recognize the problem and will understand that in attacking the problem we are a better nation. Obama has already acknowledged that we have done wrong. But if those who did wrong are not punished they will do wrong again, just like the bankers are doing wrong again a brief six years after they almost destroyed the nation. The lack of punishment for their criminal acts has led them to double down on their transgressions and they are now stealing more then they ever did before. If we have to live without a couple of the current banks, we’ll manage. If we must set a bad precedent in our political functionality, so be it. The proper maintenance of our justice system is more important than any of that. It is the building block on which the entire American brand is constructed. We cannot continue to subvert it.